by Katherine Soniat

(thinned     kiln-broiled                  and lazily    slow
a face composes)

so that one night past childhood there’d be recognition
in the eyes of another.

Block of clay      the long rendering              (the time it takes
for post-partem flux to slide forward)

Cooling blue flesh and the upside-down screams of forced entry.

Face-first, and sent forward into the days.    Seasons.
The year marked.                             (dusky clay calendar)

Limbs named and sponged.  The orifices numbered.

Possibility, how did you arrive at one child with a candle?
It’s the hide of your canoe I see through—tincture of faces,

lightening on the lake.

Katherine Soniat’s sixth collection of poetry, A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge, is recently out from Dream Horse Press. The Swing Girl, published by Louisiana State University Press, was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the Poetry Council of North Carolina. A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared recently in Women’s Review of Books, Hotel Amerika and Crazyhorse, among others.  She teaches in the Great Smokies Writers Program at UNC-Asheville. Website: www.katherinesoniat.com